


Quarrel with the sky

by grayglube



Category: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi, Period Kink, Post season three, Tres Geckos, hero twins, minor media res
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-09
Updated: 2017-02-09
Packaged: 2018-09-23 02:03:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9636014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayglube/pseuds/grayglube
Summary: She’s ancient, three more birthdays come and go and none of them are ever the same day and none of her driver's licenses belong to the state she was born in, Illinois, New York, Georgia, they don’t even know how old she really is and they never ask if she’s lonely or if she’s afraid.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Minor media res, nothing major. Title from Rumi. Quote from Joy Williams, The Art of Fiction No. 223.

 

**We live and spawn and want—always there is this ghastly wanting.**

 

* * *

 

_“Last Seen in Texas with family on-”_

 

_The poster is sun-bleached and warped, her face unrecognizable, the missing persons’ hotline scratched out by the elements. It’s folded up in half and stuck between the verses in the King James version from a bedside table next to a shared queen mattress in a motel forty minutes off I-9 in the nicer part of town._

_The bible’s got the number three written on the inside cover when he looks and there are eight more just like it in trunk of the Lincoln parked outside. She’s been gone for over a year and he knows that this time she isn’t going to show up in the middle of the night having found them again by some kind of divine intervention._

_She’s gone, again. But, she’s not coming back._

 

* * *

 

 

They never asked her to come and she never begged to be a part of their long con. She’s just following them. Sometimes she has to find her way back into the here and now but mostly they hit the compass points in order of happenstance and the blind leading the blind. They aren’t ever going to be the same again. Not since prison, not since being abandoned, not since dying.

 

He thinks about how they’re living now while he’s giving her a half wilted daffodil from the tall grass next to the picnic table, the edges of it are turning brown. The abandoned baseball field beyond the chain link fence looks sinister as his brother crosses it, coming out of the woods where he’s left a drifter no one will find until the bones go bright white under too many wholesome afternoons deep in the heart of Texas.

 

She presses the flower between the pages of the Bible she’s taken with her. There are pages with highlighted passages the same exact color.

 

* * *

 

 

She knows what Seth has done with his brother, sometimes she feels it like she’s done it herself. She knows when it first started, and how.

 

Nothing’s as horrifying as it should be anymore. Two kids growing up in a tangle of codependencies that grew roots into their lonely beds when they got older seems almost irrelevant in the after. They’ve put a dirty band aid over the itchy bug bite of their teenage indiscretions. She knows her sticking around has delayed the inevitable for a few more months just like her early death kept them at odds for all the time she was away, wandering half-alive in her own stolen body.

 

They’d never got done blaming the other for killing her and it had kept up the distance between them and their dicks.

 

They’ve been in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma for two days and she can hear them inside the room. Outside the door, in the hall, she doesn’t stop walking until she’s on the opposite stairwell.  She waits, watching the door and doesn’t swipe her key card to unlock it again until after Richie leaves to hunt.

 

It’s ten p.m. and no one in the world cares where she is.

 

The inside of the room is dark and smells like something primal. Blood and fucking. A part of her remembers what that used to taste like in a different existence, in a different world. The shower is running and she turns on the television to watch Dateline with her feet propped up on the dresser, her toes are dirty and her nail polish has chipped.

 

There’s a condom wrapper on the floor under the edge of where the hotel comforter has puddled half-way onto the floor, she gets up and hides it further under the bed so they can all keep pretending she has no idea about a word that can rearranged from nicest, insect, and scient.

 

Seth comes out of the shower with a sweating beer bottle and no towel, she can see his reflection in the dark parts of reenactment of a night drive on the crime special. He moves back inside the bathroom when he sees her sitting in the room.

 

She tilts her head at the spot on the screen that his reflection isn’t anymore, contemplates the afterimage she can still see of his cock, sleepy and flaccid, how strong his naked thighs look, the dark hair down the front of his body and between his legs. He’s covered himself with a towel when he comes back into the room.

 

“Is there anywhere to eat out there?”

 

She doesn’t turn away from the television. “Everything closes early and we have to wait another day to trade the car.”

 

She can tell that he's scowling at the back of her head and that he thinks she’s being a difficult kid. He huffs, “You’re going to have to miss Sunday service this week, I want to get out of here.”

 

She keeps her tone neutral. “You can’t trade a car on Sunday here.”

 

“That’s bullshit.”

 

When Richie returns he tells Seth Oklahoma is a blue law state. There's blood between his shirt buttons.

 

* * *

 

 

He tells his brother to hurry up and finish playing with his food. Richie pulls his mouth away from a throat he’s turned into chop meat, his dinner’s head hangs like it’s been cut halfwayfree, the eyes rolling like dice. Kate’s waiting for them on the bench outside the bus station, and they’re standing in an abandoned industrial district building a mile and a half away. It’s a long way to Lake Superior.

 

They wear jeans and t-shirts and hats that advertise beer.

 

In her capris and Spanish ruffle sleeves she looks like some girl on her way out of state for a more convenient appointment at planned parenthood to get rid of some nasty surprise, the clap or a fetus. She sits next to an elderly native American woman and doesn’t talk. Solitary men in dirty windbreakers or oil stained t-shirts or leather boots stare at her all the way into the northern United States, they follow her, or other perverts and killers and hungry degenerates in bus stations and truck stops or rest areas do. She leads them behind freestanding restrooms, or wooded places of the highway, or the edges of an empty parking lot.

 

She’s a beautiful little honeytrap and she never tells his brother to hurry up while he’s still eating.

 

* * *

 

 

“I know what it feels like to get shot.” He says, irritated.

 

He’s died once too.

 

In the backseat she doesn’t look up from her penny-saver, trying to find the horoscopes, mumbling: “Our shared experiences are very similar.”

 

Seth snorts in the passenger seat at his brother's expense and there’s a grin pulling her mouth up in the corner that only he can see in the rearview.

 

“I’ve still gotten shot more," Richie insists.

 

There’s a clench in her jaw that he can see too, but she doesn’t say anything else.

 

She doesn’t say anything for three days even though there is something she’s holding inside of her mouth like venom, a parting shot, the last word. She doesn’t say anything.

 

* * *

 

 

Subservience makes her fingers itch, she watches people and there is no equality, there is no ‘even’, no level ground.

 

She pays the clerk and leaves with her bag of twizzlers and cherry coke.

 

There’s a stray dog smeared across the road, pathetically eviscerated, she can see it from the pump while Seth fills the tank and Richie keeps to the backseat under the brim of the ostentatious cowboy hat he’d won the night before shooting pool.

 

There’s a bruise that’s bloomed under Seth’s ear, the tender soft spots of his neck.

 

Punctured and sucked.

 

* * *

 

 

_He’s going through her notebook when he finds her scribblings, “What are you doing?”_

_“Have you seen this?”_

 

_“You shouldn’t go through people’s things.” Richie tells him._

_“Well, Bambi’s got dead mom problems.”_

_Richie only smirks and settles onto the second queen bed. “Bambi’s got dead everything problems during hunting season.”_

_There are scenes from a sacrifice, scratched-in puddles of blood tearing the pages from the force of her wild stabbing in red pen against the verses of scripture, there are eyes and altars and a woman being fucked by snakes and he wants to shut it all in-between the covers of another stolen hotel bible but he only makes the pages flip-book under his thumb._

 

 _P_ _ictures undulate, a dance of doodled carnage, she’s a better artist than his brother but her earnest annotations in psalms and genesis make him queasy._

_They’ve spent seven months on the road and she’s a riddle and an anachronism of the girl she used to be, she’s pollock-esque splatter where something wholesome and good used to be. He’s afraid of her when she stares at someone too long, at him, out the window as they drive._

_“Leave her shit alone. She’ll know if you touch it.”_

 

* * *

 

 

They leave her waiting.

 

She knows how to wait and she doesn’t scowl when they come back late. A split lip on one and broken glasses on the other, their ties are askew and there’s a belt that’s missed a front loop.

 

They ask if she’s ready to go.

 

It’s funny how much they seem to forget, because when she does slip in on the driver’s side of the car and starts in second instead of climbing into the backseat it’s as if they’ve forgotten she’s existed altogether. She drives for a long time, aimless, they don’t tell her where to go, they just rest, she wonders how long it’s been since they’ve remembered they could, since they remembered they were allowed something that might be called peace.

 

* * *

 

 

He likes having her around. So does Seth.

 

She makes things a little less venomous and her presence gives them a little bit of purpose: they need to show her the ropes, teach her the abcs of heist and the basics of game theory. Somewhere along the road back to Texas one of them decided and convinced the other that they should try to build her the basics of a new life, one that maybe she could live in it one day. They've tried to make her into something that might add an edge to their duo instead of rounding them out. He knows they need a sharper corner to relieve the pressure complacency built up inside of them.

 

They aren’t meant to work for someone other than themselves and they aren’t meant to sit on some shared kingdom.

 

They were never meant to share either he decides.

 

She’s sleeping like a kid, curled up small and it’s been a long time since he’s looked at someone for as long as he’s wanted without raising hackles. He plays through the fantasy of putting a hand up the elastic leg of her underwear and rubbing her with his knuckles, getting her wet, waking her up. He replays it with more perfect detail and never makes it far enough into it to think of what words she would say.

 

She's dreaming.

 

They don’t tell Seth about Xibalba.

 

Sometimes after dreams about it he’s already sitting up outside under the moon waiting for her to pad out on naked feet in tiny shorts and an old sweatshirt.

 

* * *

 

 

_For a while there’s no make-up, no complaints about motel soap and shampoo, she’s missed a few pieces when she dyed her hair back to brown but gets it right the next time._

_The thing that fucks him up over it all is that some days she doesn’t even look happy, some days she looks like she doesn’t even care if they leave her at the side of the road._

 

* * *

 

 

She’s gotten over the fear and uneasiness of going out into the world alone because she had to when it was simply her and Seth. It isn’t even something that’s questioned.

 

In Albuquerque she goes out, at night with Richie, while he hunts, the bar is all sounds and bodies, she dances and he stalks out a meal.

 

In the dark he sinks gum deep into a man’s throat and she’s kissing a woman with dark painted lips.

 

It’s nostalgic. It’s foreign. It’s not something she’d lived before.

 

Sometimes she dreams about their father or jail or the woods or Venganza or Xibalba so when it’s her father at the pulpit it doesn’t even feel like a dream, it feels like real life again.

 

* * *

 

 

Sour hearts and Easter chocolate, back-to-school, Oktoberfest, Black Friday, every small town they drive through has something to see, something to do that never lives up to expectations.

 

She sees all kinds of things: biblical plagues and Midwestern towns where babies are being killed in the womb by the basin of the mountains and the chemical evaporation pools.

 

The real middle of America.

 

The District of Columbia and some kind of protest.

 

Santa Cruz’s boardwalk.

 

Montauk at the end of January is industrial grey, slate blue, ocean rot and so much cold her bones might cut her apart for how hard she's shivering.

 

A northeastern wasp town with a candy shop by the ferry.

 

In Florida after the second week of June in the tropical balminess the warmest rain they’ve ever felt falls.

 

Kansas and a monster machine made of a thousand blades cuts through the corn that and could chew them up into so much human confetti like a bad Halloween slasher movie death scene.

 

Mall of America.

 

The Canadian border and everything is a giant green trees.

 

She never thought bears would be so big.

 

Texas and Arizona and Mexico again.

 

She does drugs, the weed makes her heavy and the line of coke keeps her up for a night and a day and so horny she doesn’t care if they both fuck her, doesn’t care if they share her; want is a taste in the back of her throat and a prickle all over her skin.

 

She sleeps with her head against the cool glass of the backseat window, their almost twin shoulders, the wall of a bus station while they wait.

 

She goes home and finds nothing she wants to take back with her when she finds them again, easily and much faster than she should be able to, they glow like neon lights and sunrise and the amber emergency message that come on over long stretches of highway.

 

She’s ancient, three more birthdays come and go and none of them are ever the same day and none of her driver licenses belong to the state she was born in, Illinois, New York, Georgia, they don’t even know how old she really is and they never ask if she’s lonely or if she’s afraid.

 

Sometimes, they ask what she wants at the drive-thru window and sometimes they come out of convenience stores with cheap plastic things to buy her affection for another long drive, (sunglasses that are too big, a cup and ball set, a slime green harmonica with traffic cone orange teeth).

 

She’s been twenty-one for exactly one month and her candy bracelet is sticky on her wrist, her tongue blue from chewing on it when something that’s clawed itself free of where earth collapsed on top of it, something that’s crawled across the desert, seeps out of the night like a patch of shadows and talks to her in a voice like broken glass.

 

Richard might understand some of what it says and Seth might have it right in his sightline but she scuffs grainy gravel under her sandals, whose straps are starting to snap, and whisper to it in its mother tongue, the language her bones know. She gave them the body of a dead weak queen and they ate all of it. There is so much without order and she tells it she knows before dispatching it quietly back into the dark. Lately she’s been dreaming of home.

 

Before Richie got close enough to hear what the Xibalban hissed at her she got the important part of the message.

 

Something's taken her brother.

 

* * *

 

 

She doesn’t tell them where she’s gone and she might lie if they ever ask.

 

They won’t ever ask. Everything they share is simply between them, all the secrets that they know are each other’s.

 

Something had called her every night, in dreams, and every day as they drove through so much bland scenery it might as well have been all desert. She sees a red sky every day and every night for an entire week and knows that something is happening to her.

 

Her brother has been taken.

 

When she finds him she finds what’s been calling her, something human with the forgotten amulet and lesser monsters but her brother’s not in Xibalba, not yet, he’s simply tied up in an abandoned butcher shop with a Spanish menu. She kills things that are and aren't human, she saves her brother. It's not as hard as she's expected it to be.

 

He’s got an apartment not far from Houston they pack up just to be safe.

 

“It’s Plan B, Scott.”

 

“Like the morning after pill?”

 

“No, like there’s _them_ , but there’s _us._ Like there was Malvado and Celestino before any of us.”

 

“What do dead lords have to do with anything?”

 

“The lords used to be slaves and I used to be...”

 

“That wasn’t you. Aren’t you sick of having some great destiny?”

 

She stalls, she frowns, confused. She’s no longer used to not being listened to. It’s a final realization, she’s alone.

 

Scott offers her a helmet and a spot on the back of his bike, he takes her where she tells him to and leaves her on her own again and for once she doesn’t hold it against him.

 

It’s at an all-night diner a few miles from where Seth and Richie have taken up for the night that a familiar face walks up to her table and sits down smiling.

 

“Hola, chica.”

 

“You’re late, I think, Carlos.” He’s been to Xibalba too, he tells her things and she listens, somehow everything they talk about is something she’s always known.

 

* * *

 

 

_One day she’s gone. She doesn’t come back for three weeks and four days and the world feels like it’s collapsing around it’s spinning molten core. They are in a different hotel in a different city in a county they’ve never been to and she’s picks the lock on the door, (or maybe she just tells it to open for her and it listens)._

_She comes back and never tells them why she left or where she went under it's too late to stop her._

_For the first time he notices that her wrists are unblemished and her belly is pale where her shirt has rode up, a dark freckle and smooth skin, the flare of her ribs, the rise of her chest. She sleeps like there is nothing to be afraid of. She looks like she's never been dead, never bleed, never been a sacrifice twice over._

 

* * *

 

 

She’s come back and he watches Seth relax, finally. He watches him pull her close and kiss her, mashing their mouths together. 

 

Seth's eyes are shut tight but hers stay wide open and the wet smack of his lips pulling away is so much sound in the silence.

 

It’s not spontaneous, it’s been on the edge of action for a long time and his brother doesn’t even know she’s been expecting it, or that he’s been waiting for him to do it and watch how it plays out in the after.

 

* * *

 

 

They holdover in Richie’s old safehouse from when he was working with Santanico. There are candles all around the room melted onto the fuse box and the bedside tables, it’s strange to see a bed his brother has fucked someone else in. It looks like something on a stage, mood lighting and a mirror.

 

Seth finds himself stretching out on the couch almost immediately, he’s tired.

 

Kate won’t sleep in the bed even though his brother offers it in some sick sort of test to see what she'll do.

 

She crawls onto the couch too, crushed against his side and front and the cushions. It’s snug and her body runs hot, her skin smooth against places he’d never thought he’d get a stiffy over having stroked, the inside of his knee, elbow, the top of his foot, his chin, and it’s her toes and the hem of her shorts and her hair sticking on his dry lips and the heat of her young cunt against his hip through her cotton shorts when she’s asleep and straddling the crest of his hip.

 

He wonders if anyone's ever shown her how good it can make her feel.

 

* * *

 

 

There’s blood running down the water trail, the hollow of his knee, the back of his calf, his thigh burns and his cock hurts, swollen and slick and his brother’s belt, undone and loose stabs at the space under his navel. She’s left again.

 

She’s been gone for two days and told them she needed to be alone, that she’d be back soon.

 

He wonders if she’s going to come back.

 

Richie sucks on the skin of his hip, pulls back after dragging his teeth there, “She won’t tell us when she leaves for good.”

 

But, she's becoming crueler everyday.

 

* * *

 

 

They don’t tell Kate about El Rey.

 

She wouldn’t understand, she’d look at them with pity in her eyes and turn her face away and look out the car window or leave the room to swim like she knows something they don’t, like there’s something they’ve missed.

 

* * *

 

 

He’s awake, bleary but awake. The rattle and clanking thump of the ancient vending machine and coins making music in the tray when they come raining down to make change for her two-dollars, the crack and sigh when the pull tab goes under her finger and her girlish expletive when her nail breaks in half an uneven crescent.

 

She’s going to do laundry and Seth is rising from the couch he passed out on.

 

His brother strips, walking as he leaves clothes on the floor, he pisses with the door open and steps over the tub to wash away the night and the dust of another day. She comes back, opening her bag and pulling out its contents is search of something. She knocks on the open door so his brother doesn’t startle.

 

“I’ll be out in a second.”

 

“Can’t wait, don’t peek.”

 

“Just don’t flush.”

 

“Girl stuff.”

 

The blood of menstruation is like a cordite flare, he snuffles and keeps his eyes shut like he’s sleeping. She goes past again and Seth flushes blood away before he’s come out of the steam. Thirty minutes later the washing machine has finished spinning and she’s loading a dryer with their shirts. Seth is tying up a plastic bag from the bathroom, he rolls over to tell him: “You don’t have to do that every time. I’m not going to eat a used tampon.”

 

His brother doesn’t say anything, just rolls his eyes and grins like it’s still some kind of temptation.

 

Later, much later, he’s supposed to be out until dawn and Seth is supposed to be getting new license plates for their next job, but he comes back early and Seth stays out late. She’s standing naked in the bright rectangle of the bathroom, damp and pink and the string between her thighs like a pull cord for a toy.

 

She’s surprised that he’s back but not that he’s backing her up to the cheap formica sink counter.

 

He’s surprised she doesn’t try to warn him off, part of him hopes she might push him back but she barely breathes.

 

She makes a doll sound when he pulls her string and tosses the mess of it at the lidless garbage pail.

 

She makes a woman sound when he turns her around, and kneels to open her with fingers and lips. He licks her slit until it isn’t red anymore. She’s still looking in the mirror at her own face when he’s up on his feet again, chin smearing blood onto her damp naked shoulder, his eyes on her reflection.

 

Her voice is hard when she tells him: “That felt good.”

 

“Of course it did.”

 

But, something in her eyes is sad and small. Something inside of her is made up of distance and disconnect.

 

* * *

 

 

Everyone he’s ever met has thought he was the younger brother. It doesn’t matter. It always makes for a better surprise.

 

“ _Hermanito,"_ He whispers.

 

Kate’s mouth twitches up on one side.

 

Seth hasn’t heard the word, only knows that something was said behind him in a voice he recognizes. "What the fuck did you call me?"

 

* * *

 

 

_His knife is sitting on the open newspaper, casual as a paperweight and in her hand it’s warm, her mind is spilling out across a thoughtscape of red._

_“What are you thinking?” He asks._

_“Just how things used to be.”_

_He leaves his palm flat for her to put the knife there._

_It opens and she sucks in an inhale through her teeth, holds it in her chest between the flare of her ribs like it’s her own hand she’s sliced into. His blood runs off his fingers and falls over the back of her hand, warm drops she can’t look up from._

_He practically purrs, “Careful it’s Xibalban.”_

 

* * *

 

 

He asks if he’s fucked her.

 

He says he hasn’t.

 

It isn’t that he doesn’t trust his brother but he’s never told the truth anyway.

 

* * *

 

 

She breaks the surface, hugs the lip of the pool, sloshing water and gulping air.

 

The shine of his shoes, toes pointing at her temple like a gun about to go off.

 

It’s late, they’re they only two people in the world awake and the top half of her bikini drops to the cement with a wet slap, her skin goes cool and she pushes her bottoms down to her ankles, leaves them a twisted figure eight poolside.

 

He looks like he’s rolling a marble between his teeth, his brother has a similar expression, like he’s sucking on hard candy.

 

He lifts her and sets her in his lap, sits on the pool lounge made of vinyl straps. She shudders when his tongue slips inside her mouth and tap dances on her palate. His gums taste like someone else’s blood.

 

He kisses her for a long time before he shifts her off of him, drapes a pool towel over her front and leaves her to the night hum of cicadas and the pool filter grumbling in the dark. Between her legs she’s on fire but the rest of her shivers into goosebumps.

 

She dunks back down into the aquamarine of the hotel pool and doesn't care who's watching.

 

* * *

 

 

There’s something very wrong with the world.

 

They left Mexico but things never sort themselves out in a way that makes him feel better about leaving in the first place.

 

They rob a bank. Afterwards, she dyes her hair again.

 

* * *

 

 

He’s lying in a slant of late afternoon and his brother is asleep in the other bed, his heartbeat is like an appetizer.

 

* * *

 

 

“Let’s make use of what we’ve got.” Richie says to him and he finds it difficult to refuse.

 

She plays decoy and bait and little sister and stranger in the bank and lookout.

 

Once, he’d pulled her close and used her as a cover with his hand down the back of her jeans and the other up under the fall of her hair.

 

Her mouth tasted like cherry coke and her eyes had blinked gently shut, her mouth had opened like her legs around his thigh, dragging her hips closer. He panties had gotten damp under his fingers.

 

He can smell her on his fingertips later, feel her on the heel of his hand while he's stroking himself in the dark.

 

* * *

 

 

She knows exactly what to do.

 

As far as sex goes it’s all mechanical, an automatic changing of gears, one of them likes it hot and the other likes it cold.

 

All his half-guarded wants, the little preferences, the bigger kinks, a position or a view, some article left on through failure to remove made to look less than strategic and more genuine forgetfulness. A smear of sticky lip-gloss on his callouses in the perfect pornographic pink shade, the line of her back, head moving like a puppet’s, hands missing their mark when they scrabble for support. He’s taught her how to hold a gun and pick a lock and how to pick out a mark, he wants to teach her everything. He wants to be her first. His stubble burns the softness between her soft thighs.

 

Or, her eyes closed, opening softly and shutting again, sleepy peek-a-boo because he isn’t really there, he isn’t supposed to be there, he’s some quiet violator, a fantasy she’s not supposed to have, and she’s really supposed to be dumb, she is always only going to be half able to understand him, no one will ever get closer than that because he’s more than the commonly understood things, and when she works harder to be tender for him, to him, he’s going to enjoy it much more thoroughly when her throat is in his mouth and her blood fills him up, the taste of a soul, all liquid light and stunted goodness that won’t even make a dent in what he’s become.

 

They don’t have a fucking clue, that's what hurts, that's what chafes, that's what wounds the most. They both only have an idea of what she used to be or might have been and it's never been right. It'd be easy to be what they think they want.

 

* * *

 

  

It's supposed to be his job but someone recognizes him as an asshole and she ends up sneaking off with the girl he’s supposed to be charming. It’s an easier con for her than for him. She wants it just as much but the mark wants it _more_.

 

The tones of the keypad aren’t quiet, she hears the four beeps, there’s little differentiation in them but there’s enough and later when his brother is sampling her wrist and he’s still befuddled on how she got up to the mark’s room, some pretty tan tropical girl whose father puts her up in the swankiest of places with the finest accommodations, she keeps silent.

 

His brother’s seen how she’s spent the last eleven hours they don't need to announce it on letterhead.

 

Borrowed dresses made of two long swatches of silk and four strings to hold it up and closed, sticky sweet cocktails and stronger syrupy stuff, decanted and aged stock, a pouting mouth slanting over hers between laughter and the Spanish words of some pop forty hit in the hotel room of a rich man's little angel, lonely and beautiful and young and Kate knows the taste of her nipples and the perfume of her sex, mascara and body glitter rubbed all over the pillows and a soft thigh between hers and fucking that was slick and warm and the balminess of the pretty girl’s skin when she came out of the shower and Kate had put her mouth all over it again.

 

She remembers the old language of lust and how to coax another person into it, she still feels the ancient hum of it in profaned places.

 

She used to be a Queen a long time ago.

 

* * *

 

 

It’s easy to roll downhill, it’s thoughtless how easily they all make less of themselves.

 

Seth no longer pretends to care, as much a sociopath as people thought his brother always was and Richie’s started to take what he wants from people the same way he used to shoplift dime value trinkets.

 

She hasn’t lost her god or her belief in something after but she’s decided neither of them are any better than what’s she’s got right now.

 

* * *

 

 

Their time together is almost at an end. They sweat out the inevitable fall of what they’ve built together, what they’ve remade and broken again across the sheets of a bed that’s too small for the three of them even when one of them is on top of another.

 

It’s a necessary thing, it’s about knowing.

 

They no longer love each other anymore.

 

But, It’s never been what’s most important anyway.

 

* * *

 

 

_“Someone’s got to go back.” He says._

_“And you don’t want to.” She smiles._

_Richie can’t answer, he’s ashamed of the answer._

_“That’s ok,” she starts, “It’s not supposed to you anyway.”_

_Seth is too afraid, and Richie is too selfish, Scott is reckless. She’s already left once it won’t be hard a second time._

 

* * *

 

 

“Those three weeks I was gone I had to go and get my brother, I had to get him back.”

 

“From where?”

 

“They wanted to bring me there, they took him but I got him back.”

 

“Where?”

 

She doesn’t answer.

 

“From where? Kate!”

 

She just keeps walking.

 

“Kate!” He takes hold of her, shakes and he head rocks like a doll’s. “I’m going back.” She tells him quietly, shaking off his hands and leaving him standing behind her.

 

“To where?” But, he already knows, and Richie’s shape in the doorway makes him stop yelling after her.

 

“Just let her go.”

 

And, she goes.

 

Richie doesn’t let him follow.

 

And it’s funny, later. Not funny at all. Richie never believed she meant it. He thought she’d come back. Seth sucker punches him in the mouth and tells him it’s his fault.

 

* * *

 

 

They’re alone again. _Brothers_.

 

What they did not want was taken away, given away to someone else. People that aren’t them. Hero twins, “It’s the general gist of it, Seth. It doesn’t have to be exact.”

 

“It’s bullshit.”

 

They can’t find Scott, they can’t find Kate.

 

* * *

 

 

Scott finds them.

 

“Hands off dickhead!”

 

“Where’s your sister P.F. Chang?”

 

“That's some real sweet racism, Cracklebarrel.”

 

“Scott.”

 

“Fuck off, Richard.”

 

“Fucking tell me where she is!”

 

“Honestly? You’re a moron. Ask your brother, sure he figured it out.”

 

“Richard?”

 

“Xibalba, she’s in Xibalba.”

 

“What the fuck is she doing in Xibalba?”

 

“It’s where she’s supposed to be.”

 

“The world has to put itself back together.”

 

“That’s such shit.”

 

“It’s balancing back out.”

 

* * *

 

 

He fucks him and it isn’t meant to feel good, but it does.

 

“You need to get over it. She’s gone.” Richie sighs, all smoke and blood.

 

Seth rolls over, “She’s not fucking gone.”

 

* * *

 

 

She isn’t gone.

 

He finds her after he’s been dead for three days, ‘like Jesus,’ he tells her.

 

Just a stray bullet, or a knife in the dark, or revisiting old habits. It doesn't matter how.

 

“You’re not going to be happy with anything that happens after this,” she tells him.

 

“What do you mean?”

 

He finds out.

 

Richie opens the way for him to walk back through into the real world, he doesn’t want to go because even in Xibalba things can still be bright and warm and look exactly like what he wants.

 

It might as well be El Rey for what she feels like against him or what she looks like walking in front of him, leading him out, leading him to his brother, leading him away from what he’s convinced himself he could be happy with, he does not want to leave. He might have died but he is not undead, being alive again for him is not the same sort of alive his brother has found behind his own game show door open by a beautiful woman, girl, monster, queen, god.

 

In the end, he doesn’t get to keep either of them.

 

In the end, Richie’s only trading places and Kate’s found a place she doesn’t mind staying.

 

* * *

 

 

In the dark of the hotel bathroom, cheap, no questions, one queen bed and a ‘do not disturb’ sign, he holds the sink counter and tries not the think about how much breathing hurts. His eyes are two night-lights in the dark, the lit ends of cigarettes, and when he shuts his eyes the heat inside his head scratches the inside of his eyelids.

 

When he turns on the light his skin is pink like sunburn and the spray of the shower pops like it’s hitting grease.

 

He’s burning alive he decides, he’ll combust, alone, in a shitty hotel room while a trick next door cries out in fake enthusiasm to some faceless fuck in the dusk of a starting summer night.

 

He’s not expecting a knock at the door and if he’s honest with himself later he’ll admit that the loneliness was better than who was standing on the other side. Scott’s wearing a motorcycle helmet but it isn’t hard to tell who it is. “They aren’t coming back. But, she told me what to tell you.”

 

“So, what’s happening?”

 

“You’re a resurrected sun god and I’m your Jaguar warrior who will guard you on your travels as you traverse the world every morning.”

 

“You made that shit up.”

 

“Your eyes are glowing,” Scott informs him.

 

“You better come in before management thinks I like foreign food.”

 

“Me love you long time, fuck face.” He shoves past and sniffs at the state of the room.

 

“So, what? Are you my sidekick now?”

 

“I’m like your chaperone, actually.”

 

“According to who?”

 

“Our firstborn kin. Get your shit together.”

 

“Where are we going?”

 

“To meet Carlos.”

 

“That’s how all of this shit started in the first place.”

 

Scott smirks, inappropriately pleased with himself for a reason Seth can’t begin to puzzle out. “I think he’s your spirit guide. I’ve been studying Burt’s old shit. Hero twin myths.”

 

“Well, that solves _everything_.”

 

On the road later he asks him, “What do you think Kate ended up being?”

 

Scott doesn’t answer from the driver’s side of a mile and a half, he’s left his bike behind like some dangerous immortal nomad who doesn’t place stock in material things anymore. “Richie gets a teenage girl to call him daddy and be his spirit guide in his little underground kingdom and I get the coat of many colors here with you and Carlito.”

 

“Fucking splendid.”

 

"Or, maybe you're _my_ sidekick and Richie's my sister's bitch."

 

He wants to ask the kid if he thinks they'll ever see them again.

 

He doesn't.

 

He turns on the radio and it's all in Spanish.

**Author's Note:**

> On Richie being the older brother: Freddie says it in season one: "I believe the older of the two, Richie, is this cartel killer we've been looking for." And, in season 3 Carlos refers to Seth in conversation with Richie as Richie's "Hermanito" which is 'little brother'.


End file.
